In less than a month, I’m running my third marathon — and two weeks after that, my first-ever 50k. I’m definitely pushing myself more than I ever have, but luckily for me I have more data about my fitness level and my recovery than ever. I’ve been training with the Pixel Watch 3 and Fitbit Premium over the last few weeks, and here are five things I learned that will (hopefully) help me run my personal best next month!
1. I found a new sleep — and social — schedule
The most revealing stat that aided my training was my Sleep Score. It’s one thing to feel tired and another thing to see an actual score and other data that shows you your body needs to rest. By wearing my Pixel Watch 3 to sleep, I used Fitbit Premium to see sleep trends so I could adjust both my training schedule and my habits. I like scheduling my long runs on the weekends — but I also like seeing my friends on the weekends. I noticed that on nights I had social plans, I typically slept worse, so a Friday night get-together followed by a Saturday morning run was tough. This might sound overly obvious, but I figured if I logged enough hours of sleep, I’d be OK; that simply isn’t the case for me. What I eat and drink and how much energy I expend also affects my sleep. Seeing my score as well as stats like my awake time changed my thinking. So I’ve been making sure that I plan to see friends the night following my big weekend run, or even the next day.
I also learned from my sleep stats that I tend to fall asleep fast and then wake up an hour or two later. So if I know I want to get in a challenging workout the next day, I should go to bed an hour earlier so that obnoxious middle of the night wake-up isn’t as detrimental to my readiness the next day. And this has paid off: The days I go to bed earlier consistently correlate with higher Readiness scores, helping me prepare to work out instead of recover.
2. I gained confidence in knowing when to push my pace
One of the trickiest things about marathon training is knowing when to push it to increase your fitness and when to pull back so you don’t get hurt. When I started training, I was pretty tired after a 10-mile run, but that’s feeling easier these days. Still, I tend to hold back on my speed during long runs because I’m worried I’ll burn out too fast — even though I know my fitness level is increasing. Cardio load and Target load have been extremely helpful: In addition to my Readiness score — which is also a useful insight — these two metrics take things even further. Cardio load helps me understand my workout intensity as well as how hard my heart is working throughout the day, and Target Load is a recommendation of how much activity I’m ready for based on my recent Cardio load numbers and Readiness.
Plus, Readiness was recently recalibrated so that it doesn’t factor in recent activity, looking at heart rate variability, sleep and resting heart rate instead. So just because I’m training for a marathon and recording more activity than usual, the app won’t automatically show me a low Readiness score: It will take these other factors into account and see that my fitness level is increasing and I can handle more. I can use these three scores to get an idea of how much cardiovascular energy I have and how ready I am to push my speed. A high Target load number gives me some added confidence to tackle sprints or try to run my mile splits faster!